I tend to think of games in terms of lineage. It’s a two tier system where the games themselves have something like progeny, but the designers also exist in a kind of parallel continuum. There’s people where I’m simply going to buy any game they make, and there’s franchises I’ll endure no end of abuse from. So, let’s take a look at where Dropmix exists.

Frequency was the first time I’d ever heard of Harmonix, but it wasn’t my first experience with Rhythm Games. It’s possible to think of the Tempest/Gyruss planes coupled with timed entries as a kind of starting point. I loved Frequency because in addition to rewarding a type of gameplay with which I am not terrible, it also let me take the tiny samples they had cut the songs into - the little moments of audio that, in a perfect run, make a perfect song - and remix them. I unlocked songs because I thought the game was fun, but I also unlocked them so I could make music. We move on from here to Guitar Hero, of course, to Rock Band, which they also made. There have been other excursions; Dance Central and Fantasia weren’t as abstract about your interactions with the music. It took them a very, very long time to get back to what I liked about Frequency, a game where you could make cool music, but they did it. They did it. And they did it in a way Gabe can play, because you don’t need to know where the beat is. I’m not saying this to denigrate him. He has other skills and I have benefitted from them. But he does not know where the beat is, and so he doesn’t get the benefit of that extra reinforcement and ultimately the game is just too frustrating. For him, it’s like a platform game where you’re interpret the entire game - and interact with it - via smells.

I set the board down on the floor between myself and Kara, who was in the office, and I’m glad because her being there enabled him to engage with it. He held his knees and rocked a little bit, and I asked him what was wrong. He said, “I’m very intimidated by this.” I knew this was a tender moment, so I tried to manifest something like the friend who gives a shit I see represented in film. “You don’t need to know about music,” I said, which is where we got the strip from. “You just have to have a favorite song.” I told him to look through his cards and find tracks that he liked, and not worry about anything else. We went into a mode where it just interprets cards and mixes them together. He got out the vocals from Sia’s “Chandelier.” “Actually… hold on to that one,” I said. “There’s never a time when that isn’t the right play.”

Dropmix is, in actuality, a manifestation of the peripheral craze they rode back in the aughts, bred with the Toys To Life genre in a slavering, chimerical hybrid. Instead of figurines, the guts of it are cards with RFID payloads like an Amiibo card. Except where an Amiibo card might represent a legitimately tyrannical racoon, this card might represent the vocals from Chandelier by Sia. The base box comes with the peripheral game board and four decks; this board talks to your phone or tablet which you use as a display similar to Beasts of Balance.

Cards fall into colors, which generally map to what they offer a track - beat, guitar, and so on - clearly identified via icons. You can simply fuck around in Freestyle mode, which is probably where you’ll start, and may even be where you’ll stay. There’s a Party mode where you play cooperatively to fill requests and beat your high score, and there’s a 1v1 or 2v2 mode that plays a bit more like a traditional card battler. The game emphasizes adding new elements to mixes, and also has a mechanic where tracks get removed, which is honestly more important than you’d think. One of the coolest things you can do is isolate some portion of the song to understand it better. We’re gonna play the game on the stream at 2 PDT on our card game show. Might even have a special guest. I’ve got a couple things I wanna try.

Outside of Twitter or email, I don’t let strangers talk to me on the Internet. I just don’t do it. Generally speaking their “insights” about my identity fall into a few very staid categories and I feel confident I’ve experienced the flavor ridges of that particular narrative arc. I’m not resting on my anodized laurels though: I’m getting into the conversation in a big way, and there’s been some interest in the novel mode of my dialectic.

Hey! The Child’s Play Team has put together a an event this afternoon on our stream in support of the One Gamer Fund, a potent, combiner-style metacharity you can learn about at their site. We’re going to be playing the super cool Star Trek: Bridge Crew with a rotating cast of Penny Arcadians starting from 1pm to 4pm PDT if you want to roll through.

I’m still thinking about my SCA shit up at last weekend’s Banner War, partly because I got sick there so I’ve had a lot of time to lie completely motionless except for wracking coughs and the occasional turn, as meat is turned on a grill, to let the mucus collect in the other lobe of my sinuses.

Here is the comic which recounts a vital portion of the experience. I always wonder how I’d fare in another context; statistically speaking, “dead at another’s hand in the service of someone I don’t know” is probably the correct assessment.

Because it did not fit especially well into the distillation I wrote on Monday, I neglected to describe the events of Friday night in my tent. I was as cold as I have ever been in my life, nothing I brought was proof against it. The wind from the river blew straight through whatever artifice I’d constructed to confound it. The second night, Mike Fehlauer gave me a massive leather cloak that handily resolved the base issue. I started to experience various bursts of erratic thoughts, and the dumb thing is that anybody could have helped me but I didn’t ask for help because I was the new guy and this type of thing was situated firmly within the guardrails of “New Guy Shit.”

Invariably, every profoundly negative experience I have had has been a source of wisdom given enough time to process it. Let me save you some time with the first one: ask for a fucking blanket. Giving someone a blanket feels incredible. People will fight over who gets to give you an extra blanket, that’s how good it feels.

The second is that I assessed the protective power of the tent incorrectly because every other time I’ve slept in this tent Brenna was there with me. The truth of that, way down, couldn’t even be understood with language in the state I entered that night. It was rendered, instead, as some kind of animal axiom I was subject to and did not honor. It is nice, on rare occasion, to have your value structure reassessed involuntarily by an unaccountable, external, immutable force.

So, I had a high fever and I saw some shit, but now I’m back on my grind-equivalent operational status: At noon PDT, join myself and brewmaster Eric Benson for another potable episode of Acquisitions Intoxicated right on Twitch - and we’ll be… Shit, we’ll be doing a lot:

1. Discussing Drinking Culture In The SCA 2. Brewing the brutal stout we cooked up with our friend Holly Conrad(!!!) 3. Sampling glasses of Jim Darkmagic’s Velvet Cape 4. Crafting a new recipe with the stream for Viar 5. Deciding what to make next week!

After a short break, we’ll be back with the final case of co-op Choose Your Own Adventure game Mythos Tales played collaboratively with the stream. I’ve never been so sad for a game to end, it’s really been a great part of my life these last few months and I hope you’ve had fun coming along.

What you think isn’t political - that is to say, what isn’t up for debate - is really just an index of your politics anyway, and quite a robust one. For me, I don’t think teaching science in science class is a political act. I grew up in a house where “teaching evilution”... Well, the fact that we called it Evilution is probably enough information to glean the subtleties of the position. I live and let live as right until the point at which you start teaching children that we get to choose our facts. There is some shit I will not eat.

I went to an SCA event called Banner War this weekend. A lot of stuff happened, and I remember a lot of it, which puts me in a good position to relate it. For example: I wasn’t aware that, in addition to any mundane principalities I might be party to, I was also a subject of An Tir. There is another version of the World which lays its domain upon the one you know, and is carved into various baronies and whatnot, and no doubt there are laws and rules of which you are dreadfully unaware, which is to say it’s like any other day.

I was invited and thus absorbed into a larger Household for my first event, a group that has been doing this for a very long time - and, crucially, a group that already had a bardic poet-warrior type guy. In the same way that I always embody the Healer, whatever form that might take, the rhyme weirdo is generally my role. I slot in there real well. I had to figure out somebody to be, so I went with amiable barkeep.

We had three kegs of beer from Acquisitions Intoxicated on tap, and they didn’t last twenty-four hours. Omin Dran’s WAR PRIEST made believers out of guest after guest who claimed they didn’t like dark beers or IPAs. When the War Priest had given its all, we tapped Jim Darkmagic’s Velvet Cape and got whisked away on a silken-ass Mouth Journey. We expected “spice” from the mild Tettnanger hops, but a hint of it - nothing clear or present. This tasted like a rich cinnamon tea, but without actual cinnamon, which would just sit there on your tongue all cloying and gross. When you drink Velvet Cape, you feel like you’re getting away with something.

Three gallons of it didn’t last until noon.

A big part of this whole thing is drinking, as near as I can tell, and it’s reinforced at various levels of magnification. Toblero is an SCA game that you play with tiny, beer-bearing cups; there is a variant called Toblotto (apparently) which involves spirits. At a more intimate level, it’s not uncommon (read: “it is very common”) to literally wear a mug from your belt on a button-loop everyone called a Frog. You wear this precisely so you can drink out of it. Some people have drinking horns hanging from their belts, you know why. I got roped into some kind of Drinking Relay Race against a notorious house called The Gremlins; this was a tactical misstep. You’re supposed to go down the line finishing glasses and passing a metaphorical baton to the person next to you, but my fellow in this case began drinking his immediately. I didn’t learn until later that he had simply leveraged his “ignorance” in the service of free drinks but I suppose that is neither here nor there.

We were surrounded by perhaps fifty people. Because we had to start over, I accomplished my feat for a second time - but the Gremlin at the end of the line opposite us drained a glass in a terrifyingly short span. I think there’s something wrong with his esophagus and he should talk to a DOCTOR. I turned around to the people behind me, as if to say, “what in the fuck” but a woman shrugged at me, saying, “He is a Gremlin. I make no apologies for my house.”

I told a couple kids who’d acquitted themselves quite well at the Bardic competition that they’d done a good job, and they both curtsied and said “Thank you, milord.” That’s not a customary part of my life.

People engage with the overarching “fiction” to the degree they are most comfortable with, but the baseline level of engagement is very, very high. My daughter Ronia has reached the phase many young Harry Potter fans must where she speaks in a “british” accent most of the time, and she’d flip the fuck out. Some people just knit all weekend, I saw it. Some people call passing cars Dragons. I played Hero Realms at midnight in the middle of the woods. There’s a point on this continuum that anyone would like I think; I’m just figuring out how hard I want to go next year. Like, on the Mohs scale. My guess is very, very hard.

There was talk of trying the Leviathan raid, and it sounded pretty good to me, but then I realized that numbers were real and my numbers were very, very low. I’m much closer now; Greazy-E and I are gonna try to crack the 260 barrier on this afternoon’s stream around 2 PDT. Stop by?

I needed to rest after this one; I was glad to have the break in the middle of the show this time, not merely for the traditional mercenary purpose but because I actually needed a minute to collect myself. The “C” Team is one of the coolest things we’re doing right now, and it’s only growing more frigid as time passes. You can get caught up with the first few episodes with this short recap, and start from there - YouTube, Twitch, Podcast, come check it out any way you want to and stay as long as you like.